R was recently the subject of a feature article in the prestigious science magazine Nature: Programming tools: Adventures with R. Besides being free, R is popular partly because it presents different faces to different users. It is, first and foremost, a programming language — requiring input through a command line, which ... [Read more...]

I missed this when it was announced back on September 29, but R won a 2014 Bossie Award for best open-source big-data tools from InfoWorld (see entry number 5): A specialized computer language for statistical analysis, R continues to evolve to meet new challenges. Since displacing lisp-stat in the early 2000s, R is ... [Read more...]

Last month, the Philae lander touched down on comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko. In the process, the lander and the orbiting Rosetta probe captured detailed data on the geometry of the comet, which the ESA published as a shape file. You can use the rgl package to visualize and explore such shape ... [Read more...]

Every year since her inauguration in 1952, Queen Elizabeth II has delivered a Christmas Broadcast to her subjects. Dominic Nyhuis used R to analyze the transcripts of the speeches, and found some interesting trends in speech length and words used. Here, for example, are word clouds of the speeches from the ... [Read more...]

Johns Hopkins Biostatistics Professor (and presenter of Data Analysis at Coursera) Jeff Leek has published his list of awesome things other people did in 2014. It's well worth following the links in his 38 entries, where you'll find a wealth of useful resources in teaching, statistics, data science, and data visualization. Many ... [Read more...]

The R Foundation, the Austria-based non-profit founded in 2003 to oversee the R Project, recently held leadership elections and added some new members. The new R Foundation Board is: Co-Presidents: Duncan Murdoch, Martyn Plummer Secretary General: Martin Mächler Treasurer: Kurt Hornik Members at large: John Chambers, Brian Ripley, Dirk Eddelbuettel ... [Read more...]

Visualizing complex survey data is something of an art. If the data has been collected and aggregated to geographic units (say, counties or states), a choropleth is one option. But if the data aren't so neatly arranged, making visual sense often requires some form of smoothing to represent it on ... [Read more...]

We've just made the latest update to Revolution R Open, the enhanced distribution of open-source R, available for download from MRAN. The main feature of this release is an upgrade to the R 3.1.2 engine, and support for MacOS Yosemite. (You can read about all the changes in the NEWS file.) ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. Reviews of some of the R-related presentations (by John Chambers, Trevor Hastie and others) at the H20 World conference. An R/Shiny app for making egg-nog. An author's look at how R was ... [Read more...]

The O'Reilly Data Scientist Survey for 2014 is out, with fresh data on the salaries and tools used by data scientists. Jon King has a summary of the results, but not much has changed since last year: median income is down very slightly ($100k in 2013 vs $98k in 2014), and the most ... [Read more...]

A quick heads-up that this Thursday (December 11), Allen Day from MapR and Bill Jacobs from Revolution Analytics will be live presenting a new webinar, Batter Up! Advanced Sports Analytics with R and Storm. The analysis will be of baseball data, but the webinar will be of interest to anyone interested ... [Read more...]

The choice of colors you use in a statistical graphic isn't just about making your chart look good: the colors you choose are often critical to interpretation. For example, you wouldn't want to use a scale like this to represent, say, average income on a map: That palette would be ... [Read more...]

If you're a current graduate or undergraduate student and have a knack for data visualization, why not submit a paper to the 2014 ASA Statistical Graphics Student Paper Competition? Many of the past winners used R to create interesting displays of data, or created a new package for R (general statistical ... [Read more...]

It's Thanksgiving Day here in the US, so we're taking the day off to spend some time with our families and to eat far too much food. If you're in the US or celebrating Thanksgiving elsewhere, enjoy the day! And for everyone in this season of joy, here's a handy ... [Read more...]

If you've lived in or simply love London, a wonderful new book for your coffee-table is London: The Information Capital. In 100 beautifully-rendered charts, the book explores the data that underlies the city and its residents. To create most of these charts, geographer James Cheshire and designer Oliver Uberti relied on ... [Read more...]

With so many more devices and instruments connected to the "Internet of Things" these days, there's a whole lot more time series data available to analyze. But time series are typically quite noisy: how do you distinguish a short-term tick up or down from a true change in the underlying ... [Read more...]

Mike Cavaretta is Ford Motor Company’s Chief Data Scientist, and was tasked by the incoming CEO Alan Mulally to help change the culture so that "important decisions within the company had to be based on data". In a feature article at Dataconomy, he reveals that R is a big ... [Read more...]

Todd Schneider's blog post on solving the traveling salesman problem with R hit the front page of reddit.com. This is a big deal: front-page placement on the popular social news site can drive a ton of traffic (in Todd's case, 1.3 million pageviews). But what factors determine which of reddit's ... [Read more...]

The video replay from last week's Introducing Revolution R Open webinar is now available, and I've embedded it below for anyone who may have missed the live presentation. In addition to providing an overview of Revolution R Open, the presentation also introduces other open source projects from Revolution Analytics. If ... [Read more...]

The R language has jumped to number 12 in the November 2014 TIOBE Index of programming language popularity. This is R's highest ranking in the history of the TIOBE index, which has been ranking languages since 2003. A high ranking is an impressive achievement for R given that it is a domain-specific language (... [Read more...]